Jesus Talk on Free Speech Alley

It snowed today here in my southern town--a rarity in any event made even rarer by the fact that it was the second or third time this winter that we've gotten such precipitation. All over campus this morning, students trudged to class holding their camera phones out in front of them to capture the scene of big, wet gobs of snow raining down.

I passed by my campus's free speech alley, where tables set up for the day's speakers and activities sat unattended, gathering slush as the snow-drops melted almost instantly. No evangelists today, I thought.

I wrote last time about the "free speech alley fundamentalists"--a group of highly conservative, turn-or-burn evangelists whose outreach techniques seems mainly to consist of telling passersby how wicked and wretched they are. I assume they follow some slightly less polished version of truth-proclamation (kerygma) practiced by evangelists such as Ray Comfort. That is: start with the hard truth of the law (i.e., for all have sinned...the wages of sin is death/hell) and let the spirit convict so that repentance and salvation may follow.

That may be their rationale. The impression they convey, however, has less to do with the awesomeness of God's righteousness and grace and more to do with the irritation and insults Christians cause to others. If the goal is to win disciples for Christ, I can't imagine the free-speech-alley fundamentalists get anywhere close.

But I'm writing in circles. I've ruminated before--many times in this blog--about how evangelism of the "law-then-conviction-then-repentance" variety typically doesn't bother to justify itself in terms of how effective it is. Rather, people like Comfort insist that leading with sinner's guilt is the best evangelical technique because it's what the Bible commands.

The Way of the Master (Comfort's technique) features as its emblem the letters WDJD--What Did Jesus Do? In Comfort's reading, Jesus consistently produced converts by leading sinners to a realization of their own guilt and need for repentance. In the story of Jesus's conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well, for example (John 4: 1-26), Jesus turns a conversation about material thirst into a discussion of spiritual thirst. He confronts the woman with the fact that she's had many different husbands and is now with a man not her husband. She tells her neighbors, many of whom then meet Jesus and become believers.

Comfort strongly believes that without authentic conviction, the honest and deeply-felt realization of one's total depravity and helplessness in the fact of God's righteousness, true repentance and salvation cannot occur. His whole technique nets people into formulaic question-and-answer sessions about the ten commandments that terminate in the conclusion that the person is sinful and worthy of hell. Without the keenly felt threat of hell, argues Comfort, unbelievers have no reason to receive Christ as lord.

I've written at length about my disagreements with this theology. But let me say here that, compared to the evangelists who visit my campus with their "REPENT OR PERISH" signs and "You're headed for hell!" accusations, Comfort is positively charming. At least he recommends engaging a person in a Socratic (if narrow and teleological) exploration and discovery of their own guilt. The Alley Fundamentalists simply bray forth blanket accusations and tsk tsk when "pride" closes the ears of their audience.

We have a saying in performance analysis that "the medium is the message"-that how a message gets delivered conveys as much meaning as the literal content of the message itself. If this notion is even half true, the alley fundamentalists communicate a kind of contempt for those they claim to want to reach. Noisy accusations at strangers, shouting matches with hecklers, and garish shock-show REPENT! signs--no matter what the words used--tend to say, "I couldn't care less what you think of what I'm saying. This whole performance is about my saying things at you. My responsibility as a communicator stops when I stop speaking."

I've been meaning to spend some time watching them on free speech alley, cataloguing what constitutes a day's work for them, perhaps even speaking to one or more of them about their techniques. I doubt, alas, that such a conversation would get very far. They, like most turn-or-burn street evangelists, are likely well-insulated against having long conversations about why they choose to evangelize as they do. They're on the clock, doing work, not looking to chat with some long-haired hippie professor.

I suspect I'd have better luck with a wholly different kind of evangelist who regularly patronizes our free speech alley. This older gentleman simply sits in the shade on a folding chair. Across from him sits another chair just like it. The only sign he displays is a white long-sleeved shirt he wears reading "Jesus Talk." He sits quietly, not accosting anyone, not selling or yelling, but his invitation sounds loud and clear: sit and chat for a bit. Sometimes when I pass I see someone in his chair, usually in earnest conversation as he listens.

I have no idea what kind of theology he professes or what kind of gospel (if any) he preaches. But his evangelical performance stands in sharp contrast to that of the turn-or-burn crowd further up the sidewalk. It may be he believes in the law/conviction/repentance model just as strongly as they do. But if so, he's clearly made the decision that blaring it out with voice or signs just isn't the way to go. Instead, the message he's stating, the truth he's telling, has more to do--again--with the medium in which he says it. That is, just the semiotics of his setup--an open-ended, non-coercive invitation to talk about whatever--suggests a powerful impression about what faith is and how it ought to act in the world. "Come talk," he implies, "Talk about anything Jesus-related. I'll listen. I'm here."

I like that so much. It resonates so much more strongly with my reading of what Jesus actually did. A reading of the woman at the well, for instance, misses the point if it stops at Jesus's pointing out the woman's lifestyle. She fires back with conversation about the well itself and about history. Jesus responds not by returning to the topic of her sin or by lecturing her about her hellish fate but by listening to what she says and building off of that. I see him doing this again and again in scripture: listening, asking, responding. Never does he warp the conversation into a formula of guilt. Sometimes he doesn't talk about sin at all.

But he's there. He's listening.

Surely there's a kerygma--a truth-proclamation--that consists of open presence and attentive conversation. Surely that's closer to the way of the master than street signs and yelling.

More later,

JF